


Quiet Nowhere

by sanerontheinside



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Brain Damage, Gen, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Medical stuff, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-26 23:24:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9928649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanerontheinside/pseuds/sanerontheinside
Summary: The Operative, drifting.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EclipseMidnight (EternalEclipse)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EternalEclipse/gifts).



> Prompted on tumblr by EclipseMidnight with the following quote: "Even if it’s not your fault, it’s your responsibility."

He hadn’t had a name in a very long time.

Operatives had never been provided with false identification, because in theory they needed none. They were invisible, and could all but walk through walls. They had no name, no past. Why would they need a false identity, then? They were never meant to blend in.

It was hard to find a job, even when he was certain no one could even guess at his history. He didn’t have a name, his body was well-cared for (fashioned into a weapon, but how could they tell?), and yet no one seemed inclined to even give him a place to stay.

Finally one man had looked him up and down, waved him in through his door with a sigh. ‘Monk’, the owner called him. He wasn’t sure if that was meant to be an insult, or perhaps a reference to the clothes he wore – he’d burned the uniform first chance he got. But he didn’t have any other name, and Monk – thinker, scholar – would do. He wasn’t much of a scholar at the moment, but someday he wanted a library of his own, a cabin in some peaceful, secluded area of a world untouched by Alliance meddling.

He couldn’t have said why, except that it was something he’d never had. Until that time, he had plenty of thinking to do. Boss called it sulking, but he didn’t grumble or even laugh. Monk thought he must have been one of the war veterans who knew a thing or two about guilt and Intelligence. He wondered how bloody obvious his own reflexes and skills and augmented memory must be, then decided not to bother. He was sure the stamp of Death clung to his skin. Of all the names he’d been called since he’d gone on the run, Monk was a damn sight better than Ghost or Deadman or Death. 

Two years later, the Alliance still hadn’t fallen apart. He wondered if Captain Reynolds had known then, that releasing the story of Miranda would make no difference. Or had he hoped, to the bottom of his boots, even while knowing the probable outcome? Silence, stagnation, bold-faced lies—everything the Alliance was was too big to kill.

There was an internal reshuffling, though. The same inside coup that he’d run from had claimed the lives of the leaders of each division, every single project, not a stone left unturned. They’d ushered in an ‘era of transparency’, but even Monk knew what that meant. They’d simply taken their favourite projects, removed the directors, shuffled the records and scientists away deeper into their vaults and slapped a different name on the operation. Transparency went only as far as they wanted to you to see.

He wondered if that meant they’d come looking for him, then decided that it didn’t matter. Why come looking for a ghost that didn’t exist in the first place? He kept his head down, cleaned the bar, handled the neighbouring greengrocer stand, collected the money, took his cut at the end of the night, and never gave anyone trouble. He watched as the story of Miranda became an artist’s rendition, a wild theory for the origin of Reavers. He watched as recordings of River Tam were played and the rumours of her training and conditioning were spread. Some of was apocryphal, some of it was shockingly real.

Actually, he’d found himself on the edge of flight more than once in the last few months, when he heard them describing something that had been done to her. The ones who got it right, they described things sickeningly familiar.

_The Operatives never had panic attacks or bad dreams, never had involuntary physical reactions to fear or the rush of adrenaline. Never, or you were imperfect. Everything must be controlled, everything can be controlled –_

He laughed at them sometimes, privately, internally, or sometimes at the end of the day up in his shabby little room with a bottle of rotgut and a stale rolled cig, staring and blowing alcohol-laden breath and smoke out the window into to the cold rain. Did they really think that Reaver-Killer River was the Alliance’s first successful re-education experiment? Or grooming experiment, really. Ridiculous, how they could be so gods-damned gullible. ( _Me, too,_ he added with a dull shrug.)

No: the Alliance had learned early on that they could be fooled, infiltrated, betrayed. There was a story half-myth by now, of a poor farm-boy who became a great military leader of the Alliance—a General whose name was still printed in history books and lauded for strategic brilliance.

An orphan, of course, since orphans made the best recruits. Orphans were loyal to an ideal first, to individuals afterwards—though many were still terribly, foolishly loyal to their recruiters.

He’d met them, the recruiters—the really good ones. Few of them were Operatives themselves: most were quiet types whom you’d never suspect of anything untoward. They were all unassumingly terrifying; they all could be whatever you wanted, whatever you’d never had, and they would present you with a choice that led to sanctuary at their hands and damnation everywhere else. Almost all of them even went on to be their protégé’s handler, particularly for the promising ones. Sometimes, if they were very good, they could count on an Operative to trust them; sometimes even long enough to cut all the strings and hang the failed Operative out to dry.

(He’d killed his recruiter long before that could happen.)

The General had taken a different course altogether, as it turned out. The day he encountered an Alliance recruiter, he cut all ties with the Independence – not that there were any for the Alliance to trace. He wanted a military education, and Intelligence wanted their man in the command structure. The Independence had wanted a man on the inside.

Everyone got what they wanted, at least on that one day.

Monk wondered what it must have been like, to go through years of education and training, to fight shoulder to shoulder with those same people and watch them bleed for you and know they had your back; to slowly feed the Independence information that would kill them. To know that an officer’s wife had given birth only a week ago to a beautiful baby girl, and that you were, in effect, responsible for that man’s death.

But he was good, so good, they never caught him. Not until the day the General had had nothing left to lose, and he sacrificed all of his forces in an embarrassing defeat, all in the goals of ending the war. To an Alliance General, it would have been embarrassing. To an Independence agent, it was a work of art. What was it to the _man?_

They didn’t teach that at school, of course. The idea that the General had been an Independence agent all along was a failure they wanted to hide, because the Alliance was perfect. They’d learned to correct that mistake, anyway. Monk bore the scars on his brain to prove it.

Why train a fanatic, when you could make one? Why train a man, when you could fashion a weapon out of him, play to his tastes and hobbies and cultivate them until they were deadly or useful, but nothing else? Teach him to hate himself, and even so teach him that he was necessary. That it was necessary to be the monster at the gate who would usher in the glorious New Age Without Sin.

Monk’s nightmares often left him knotted up in silence and aching muscle. About two years in, after a particularly bad night and a bad batch of moonshine, he woke up screaming, and vomited up his last meal. There were parts of his training he hadn’t even remembered, as it turned out. He’d never wanted to. He never wanted to see that again, but now the images, the sights and sounds, they wouldn’t leave him alone.

His boss found him curled up on the floor, shaking, drenched in a cold sweat and burning up. For two days, the boss’s wife cared for Monk, silent and scared even of a sick man. On the third day, he felt well enough to move—still lightheaded, though, he clung to the banister all the way down the stairs. It was too early for there to be guests at the bar beyond the regulars who never seemed to leave. Hells, they probably spent the night on the stoop. He sat down in the corner by the back exit, keeping to the shadows where his huddled form might be mistaken for one of the regulars, and said nothing.

He’d almost nodded off before anyone realised he was there and not upstairs, but started awake when a bowl of something hot and well-spiced was shoved under his face.

“Eat this,” Boss said. His voice was rough, but uncharacteristically soft. Monk stared up at him. “And go see her,” he added, jabbing his thick calloused finger at a datacard he’d left beside the bowl.

_Dr. Anna Fang._ He figured he might as well.

Dr. Anna Fang was a neurosurgeon. She’d been Alliance-educated on scholarship—chip on her shoulder, probably. Monk knew that because she’d been one of a select few to own and run a private clinic that served Alliance elite. Her clinic specialised in the sort of ailments no one wanted the world to know about. Cancers of the brain were bad for business, or so the story went, so businessmen and Generals and Marshals and the higher tiers of civil servants went to her. He knew, because he’d tried to hack into her company’s system once. He’d wanted a weakness to exploit, to cast aspersions on one wealthy businessman and then to have him quietly removed. Anna Fang was either very good at hiding things, or very good at hiring people to keep them hidden.

She hadn’t been a priority then, just an obstacle he hadn’t the time nor cause to break down. But he’d passed her name on to someone else. There was, after all, such a thing as being too smart for one’s own good.

So what was she doing out in the middle of nowhere?

“That’s Alliance equipment.”

Those were the first words that awkwardly fell out of his mouth as Dr. Fang opened her office door to usher him in. He’d caught sight of all sorts of shining machinery and computers, kiosks and diagnostic scanners, all of them of terribly familiar design.

Dr. Fang’s expression went flat and still for a heartbeat. “Go ahead and report me, then,” she offered, throwing down the challenge as she stuck out her chin and her eyes flashed with stronger steel than he’d expected. He said nothing and walked past her to take a seat in front of the heavy wooden desk. If anything looked like it had been sourced locally, that was it.

Dr. Fang arched an eyebrow at him, but said nothing else outside of professional inquiries. She listened to everything he said about bad dreams, resurfacing memories he didn’t want, the near-panic attacks he’d been trained to breathe through, and the times the training had failed. She took scans and shoved a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses onto the bridge of her nose and let him watch as she studied them, spinning the projections back and forth. She even explained what she was looking at, though he already knew what to expect.

Finally she took off the glasses—round, and oversized to the point of making her look ridiculously small—and pinned him with a hard stare.

“There’s not much I can do for this, and you know it. These procedures were not meant to be reversed.”

No, he agreed, they were not. He couldn’t say why his chest felt so heavy – after all, he hadn’t expected anything different.

“Perhaps you can tell me what you remember, though, of what they did to you. I might be able to help in other ways.”

Monk nearly laughed. “What, like a shrink?”

Dr. Fang jerked up one shoulder, noncommittal. “Whatever you need. At least my time spent talking would cost far less than my time spent slicing and dicing.”

He levelled a sharp look at her. “I can’t afford you, Dr. Fang.”

“Of course not, you’re just a figment of my imagination, after all,” she retorted pleasantly without missing a beat, and raised the expressive eyebrow again. “I’m not entirely stupid, you know. Even after repeating a procedure like this multiple times, on multiple people, there is still a great deal of risk involved in such a procedure. And the scarring alone hardly gives the effect they would have wanted. Brains are plastic, they work around injuries.”

She looked back to the projection, an oddly grave expression on her face. It made him uncomfortable.

“Most of this work would have been done while your brain was developing. I guess you must have been considered a promising subject.”

“Mourning the boy who never had a chance to grow up?” he asked, a sharpness in his voice that sounded strange in his ears. He’d let that part of his life go, hadn’t he? He wasn’t the man who played with others’ grief or temptations anymore, yet he’d sensed something in her and latched onto it. It almost made him feel sick for a second. 

Or perhaps he was wrong, this time, about what he thought he’d seen.

Dr. Fang gave him a tolerant look. “No,” she said, her tone a study in a duel of exasperation and patience. “I’m sitting across from a man the Alliance felt was promising enough to withstand the torture that shaped him into whatever they needed. I’m not mourning a child who never had a chance because he was clever and brilliant. I’m sitting across from a man who survived because he was clever and brilliant. If anything, I should be very afraid.”

“Are you?”

There it was again, that non-committal shrug. “Would you be offended if I said ‘yes’?”

“No. But then why are you trying to help me?”

She tilted her head, eyes sliding away to the curtained window behind him. “Well, why not?”

“That’s not a reason.”

“Why did you run?”

Monk laughed again, the sound as dry and brittle as before. “What, out of solidarity, then?”

Dr. Fang smiled. “I didn’t run because I was scared, I ran because I finally got the chance. You—" she pointed sharply “—ran because you had no other choice.”

He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. His face had made it to the wanted lists, after all. “No.”

“No?”

“I ran because they made me a monster for a lie.”

Fang smiled—a sharp, but not unpleasant, sharkish grin. “That’s a good reason.”

“Why did you want to run?”

Fang’s smile softened. “Not a single piece of equipment here is marked ‘Alliance manufacturing’. This planet has mines, refineries, companies that can do more delicate work than simple harvesters and clunky shuttles.”

_Oh._ “You gave them the schematics.”

“I gave them the equipment, actually. Sent it back to the clinic mostly intact. While I worked with them, I asked them to make a few changes and improvements. Would have taken me years and dozens of appeals to get some corporate representative who came to my door with a sad little smile and a regretful apology on his lips.” Fang shrugged. “Support the local economy and technology sector, feed the starving local innovators, and you foster the independence of at least one particular planet.”

When put that way, at least, it made sense.

So he went to her. He didn’t tell her most things, unless she pushed too hard—she tried not to, but there were days when even a nudge might go too far. To his surprise she even took violence in stride, never showed more than a flash of disgust even when he’d described, in gory detail, exactly how to manipulate someone. Those hurt her the most, he could tell. He even dissected one or two times he’d used the same gift on her, but she’d only smiled and nodded.

“Where it concerns my profession, I can spot that from a mile away. You got what you wanted because it was also what you needed.”

Painkillers for the headaches. Tablets he hadn’t realised were meant to treat alcohol dependency. Vitamins for what he’d lost in the last two years spent curled up in a bottle of moonshine. That bitch had manipulated him right back. He liked her more, all of the sudden. At least he respected her for it. She didn’t need to help him, and it was still hard to imagine she’d wanted to.

Mostly, they talked about guilt. Fang didn’t seem to believe in guilt. Not that she ever said so, outright, or even denied her own, but she considered it an irksome waste of time. That much, he could tell.

When he asked her about it, asked her how she could just ignore it, she’d sighed and slapped down a thin sheaf of papers on her desk, throwing her horn-rimmed glasses to rest on them and rubbing at her eyes.

“I left patients behind. I didn’t want to, but apparently my security was too good for the Alliance’s comfort. The hypocrisy of it—I follow the doctor-patient confidentiality agreement to the letter and they can’t read those files, so I must be a danger to the Alliance.

“But I can’t _do_ anything about that. Guilt is only any good to me if I can use it. You, though, based on these scans? Legally, you weren’t in a right state of mind. You were in a state of mind created by the Alliance.”

“And that’s somehow absolution?”

“That’s up to you to find within yourself. But what I’m saying is, it’s not your fault.”

He mulled over that one for a minute. _Not your fault, still your responsibility._

_If it affects your performance, if it affects your mission, even if it’s not your fault, it’s still your responsibility._

He wondered here he’d heard those words before. Probably covering for a mate in training, watching their inevitable fall.

The Alliance hadn’t even been bruised by the Miranda revelations. Just a clever fiction, they’d said, reshuffled their command structure, and everyone had gone about their business.

“They were still my actions. The result—or the lack of one—that is still my fault.”

Fang eyed him thoughtfully, then folded her hands in her lap and leaned forward, elbows resting on the arms of her chair.

“We all pick our own battles, though, don’t we,” she mused. “If this is a battle you want to pick, if this is a fight you want to be involved in, then it’s _your choice,_ ” she pointed again, less like a stabbing motion at his chest and more like _identification._ “Brains continue to be plastic all through life, as I’ve told you. They’re just a bit slower than they were when you were young. Whatever choices you make now, they are undeniably yours.”

“So then what do I do?”

Fang seemed to sense it wasn’t a question meant for her at all. “As far as your time with me is concerned, the fact that you want to do something is far more important than what that something is. You’re a smart man, Monk. That’s how you survived. I’m sure you can find your way.”

He’d changed his nighttime perch, from the windowsill to the roof. He was less likely to tumble off the narrow surface here while he stared up and blew smoke at the stars. _What the hell,_ he thought. He knew enough about secret operations to guess which ones had simply been renamed and pushed off further into the dark, though certainly not abandoned. Not much information to sell, but it was certainly a place to start.

Just a little bit closer to a cabin with a library in the middle of quiet nowhere.


End file.
